Apr. 30, 2021 3:20 PM
Izz a-Din al-Batash still doesn’t really know what happened to his eye. His parents are afraid to tell him what’s lurking beneath the bandages. He may have removed them himself in secret and seen the gaping hole, or maybe not. In the meantime, his father switches to Hebrew when he talks to us about the eye his son lost.
Izz a-Din is a wiry, shy boy of 14. He lives with his parents, five brothers and two sisters in a renovated stone building in the Old City of Hebron – an area that’s under the control of Israel and its settlers, which has been virtually emptied of its Palestinian community for some time. Only the poorest and the weakest remain in this ancient ghost city, whose dying market this week sputtered briefly to life under the aegis of Ramadan.